Animation and Digital Industry Day Hotel Nexus Seattle | April 23, 2016 1 Acknowledgement Royal Thai Consulate- Los Angeles: Consul-General Jesda Katavetin Dr. Eakalak Khan, ATPAC Advisor Consul Sunh Arunrugstichai Animation Team: TAWA: Mr. Arut Tantasirin, Nickelodeon Animation Studio Dr. Gaviphat Lekutai, Board/Organizer Mr. Chanon Thareechit, Blizzard Entertainment Ms. Natjaree Chutikul, Board Chair Mr. Rattanin Sirimaruemarn, Walt Disney Dr. Jirote Bongkotmart, President Animation Studios Ms. Sunisa Lekutai, Registration Mr. Natt Mintrasak, Walt Disney Animation Studios Ms. Nutchanun Vongvitayavet, Registration Dr. Porranee Thanapakpawin, Emcee 1 IT Team: Dr. Jiranida Phuwanartnurak, Emcee 2 Dr. Sansern Thongmee, Amazon Dr. Sansern Thongmee, IT Liaison Dr. Kittipat Kampa, Redfin Dr. Jan Rungruangkonkit, Board/Transportation Ms. Dalin Kongseri, Amazon Ms. Kanokwan Kammachatkanok, Treasurer Mr. Nat Luengnaruemitchai, Amazon Mr. Chanon Sinitskul, Photographer 1 Mr. Supasorn Suwajanakorn, CISE UW Mr. Sippakorn Tansutthiwess, Photographer 2 Mr. Worachai Chaoweeraprasit, Microsoft Dr. Jay Jaroensabhayanont, Plaque Award Ms. Phannipha Arunyaangkul, Facebook Ms. Araya Pudpard, Board/Raffle Certificate Ms. Saranya Udomsri, Amazon Racha Restaurant, Raffle Certificate Mr. Prakarn Nisarat, UW Thai Mana Restaurant, Lynnwood Djan’s Thai Restaurant, Seattle University of Washington: Dr. Wiworn Kesavatana-Dohrs, UW Faculty ATPAC: Dr. Wanpracha Chaowalitwongse, UW Professor Dr. Wanpracha Chaowalitwongse, ATPAC President Mr. Chawin Lertsachanant, Thai SA President Dr. Sirivatch Shimpalee, ATPAC VP Dr. Praprut Songchitrusksa, ATPAC VP City University: Dr. Chuleeporn Changchit, ATPAC VP Mr. Tom Cary, Dean of City University of Seattle 2 Report Summary __________________________________________________________________ Rapporteurs: Praprut Songchitraksa, Texas A&M Transportation Institute Chuleeporn Changchit, Texas A&M University Sirivatch Shimpalee, University of South Carolina Kittipat Kampa, Redfin Welcome Remarks TAWA – Jirote Bongkotmart Dr. Jirote welcomed the participants. The TAWA purpose is to connect Thai people together, help Thai people, and collaborate on projects such as Thai festival. ATPAC – Wanpracha Chaovalitwongse Dr. Wanpracha (Art) introduced ATPAC. ATPAC brings Thai professionals in North America together to help Thailand. Digital Animation Industry is one example of the west coast strong area. It is an industry that improves economic potential in the USA and has the similar potential to do the same in Thailand. Opening Remarks Royal Thai Consulate Los Angeles – Consul-General Jesda Katavetin CG Jesda welcomed participants. The primary goal of this event is to connect Thai people who shares the same expertise and interest together. There are about 50 – 60 participants today. The Consulate in LA oversees 13 states in US. The main focus of digital economy in Thailand are: animation, e-learning, gaming, and new media. These are the innovative areas that Thailand can improve their capacity and drive the economy forward. Today’s event will allow private and public sectors in Thailand to connect to the right people when they need help for specific expertise. The current government tries to mobilize strength from all sectors in the society under the name of “Pracharath” (ประชารัฐ) to jointly move the country forward on sustainable footing. IT & Animation Kickoff – Gaviphat Lekutai, AT&T Dr. Gaviphat described digital economy “new” S-curve which requires an upside surprised of creativity or entropy. IT and animation industry play a critical role to raise the S-curve. This new upside surprised of creativity can be modeled as a Shannon Stack which consists of 5 layers; from lowest creativity (Stack 1) to highest creativity (Stack 5): 3 Stack 1: The information “pipes” (AT&T, T-mobile, Comcast, etc.) Stack 2: Platforms for devices and software to deliver contents or services (Google, Amazon, etc.) Stack 3: Original creation of contents (DreamWorks, Walt Disney’s, Netflix, etc.) Stack 4: Platforms enabling peer-to-peer exchange of information (FB, Bitcoin, etc.) Stack 5: Distributed intelligence embedded in devices for self-autonomy or Internet of Things (No dominant companies yet. Examples include connected homes e.g. Nest, connected cars, Google Glass, autonomous driving, Amazon Echo, etc.) Amazon starts with Stack 2 and try to become original content creator (Stack 3), as well as IoT (Stack 5). Microsoft begins with Stack 2. Facebook begins with Stack 4 – human to human interactions. Google expands from Stack 2 to all stacks ranges from Google Fiber and Google Loon (Stack 1) to Google Car, a machine to machine/people interactions (Stack 5). AT&T moved from a traditional pipe with Stack 1 to an acquisition of DirectTV (Stack 2 & 3) towards connected home/connected car (Stack 5). The embodiment of new creativity/innovations requires both IT and animation communities. Animation Overview – Arut Tantasirin, Nickelodeon, Chanon Thareechit, Blizzard Entertainment and Rattanin Sirinaruemarn, Walt Disney The speakers gave an overview of animation and game industries by categorizing the roles. In this presentation, the focus was on animator, visual effects and game character design. Mr. Arut (North) described what it takes and journey to become an animator, which requires concept design, artistic design, character development and act-out skills. Mr. Rattanin (Tu) described the general process of building a realistic visual effect. He show-cased his work on the waterfall scene in the movie Zootopia. The visual effect job requires tedious work of observing the slow motion video and trial-and-error on combining multiple effects.Mr. Chanon (Non) opened Q/A session and talked about the evolution of computer graphics from 1997 until now. He showed some popular demo that was very expensive in the past, but can be very cheap if were to be done nowadays due to the computer graphics technological advancement. He also suggested some tips for younger animators that good animators should have both technical graphics skills and act-out skills. IT Overview – Dalin Kongseri, Amazon Ms. Dalin described an estimate of Thai professionals in the tech industry around the Seattle area including ~ 50+ Microsoft, 30+ Amazon, Boeing, etc. Common IT terminologies such as cloud computing, machine learning, Internet of Things, big data analysis were described. Many Thai IT professionals have helped created a number of new innovations such as Amazon Echo (Alexa), fraud detection, machine learning, etc. 4 Amazon put big emphasis on effortless customer service (as you can see on the logo depicting the smile) including a simple one click order, one day delivery, etc. The presentation walked us through new trending in IT concepts at Amazon (case study) such as robots that helped bring 300 million of merchandises in the Amazon inventory/warehouse to the shippers/packers, a global Amazon clouds supporting third party marketplace, etc. Ms. Dalin explained how Amazon has successfully utilizes information technology in all aspects of its operations to achieve over 250 billion USD valuation. Animation Experience Art of Creating Animation Shorts – Arut Tantasirin, Nickelodeon Mr. Arut introduced animation short film named Cheezz. The film was inspired by a real Japanese uncle named Yamazaki, a Warbie bird, and a Japan town in San Francisco. A storyboard is considered the most critical part of the film. A second short film is “lucky.” This is a loop short film where the first frame must be the last frame of the film. A Warbie bird character was later developed into several products such as line stickers and cookie. Main software is Maya (costs about $30-$40 per month). Effect and Game Animation – Rattanin Sirinaruemarn, Walt Disney Mr. Rattanin explained how to produce the waterfall effect in Zootopia in CG: Simulate fluid Simulate whitewater (extract some data from fluid sim) Simulate mist Technical challenge Sheer amount of data Hacking fluid solver (Houdini) Procedural geometry, no simulation Artistic challenge Believable scale Match the look from Vizdev How to make it better Better design of procedural system of waterfall Improve the falling water look by making small droplet look like it is dragged by surrounding air Render as volumetric shader Optimize and compress the large data Opt for python script to automate the setup 5 IT Big Data Experience Machine Learning – Kittipat Kampa, Redfin Dr. Kittipat described Echo is an example of deep learning to translate voice to machine language. Redfin tries to be the best price estimator in the real estate industry. Data science changes from gut-feeling to data-driven decision, which provides insights that are not obvious. Walmart can prepare the inventory properly special event, such as hurricane. What are not obvious? Beer is best-selling before hurricane. Strawberry Pop tarts sell rate is 7 times before the hurricane. Data scientists are people with some mix of coding and statistical skill. Type A (Analysis) – maybe statisticians. Type B (Build) – some statistics plus very strong coders. Venn diagram: Hacking skills Math & statistics Substantive expertise Machine learning = computer science + statistics Bigger data, more complex data, faster calculation Tasks in machine learning Supervised learning – need label on each record Unsupervised learning – label is not needed, for example using clustering algorithm to determine 5-7 the diaper size for babies. Reinforcement learning – reward and punish the